For the Tudors, There Was no ‘Tudor Era’

By Christopher Shea

Cliff Davies, an Oxford historian, says that practically no one who lived during the so-called Tudor era — Henry VII to Elizabeth 1 (but most famously Henry VIII) — used that phrase:

“The word ‘Tudor’ is used obsessively by historians,” says Dr Davies. “But it was almost unknown at the time.”

David Hume, says Davies, played a key role in introducing the phrase into popular usage (in the 1700s), and it immediately proved “seductive,” Davies says, to people who find it useful (thematically and mnemonically) to divide history into clearly distinct periods.

Davies argues that “text-book writers and makers of period dramas should re-think their terminology, as he says that talking about ‘Tudor men and women’ introduces an artificial concept which would have had no contemporary resonance.”

He has been waiting for “clever American professors to come up with examples to prove [him] wrong” about the near-total absence of the word “Tudor” in documents from the, er, Tudor era, but so far his thesis holds up, he says.

Comments (1 of 1)

We should stop calling it the Bronze Age because the people living then did not think of themselves as living in a Bronze Age. This is, perhaps, the most ridiculous idea to come out of academia in awhile.